Naval Support Facility Dahlgren

The Air Force's 20th Space Control Squadron, Detachment 1 was officially established on Oct. 1, 2004 and was operationally accepted on Oct. 7 the following year as a component of the 20th Space Control Squadron headquartered at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla. The unit was established to assume operations from the Navy of the nation's oldest space surveillance radar, informally known as the ‘‘Fence.” In addition the unit also took on the Navy's Alternate Space Control Center (ASCC) mission as the backup computational and command and control node for the Joint Space Operations Center-Space Situational Awareness Operations Cell (JSpOC-SSAOC) at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Cal. The detachment is comprised of 11 active duty Air Force, 46 Air Force civilians and contractors and over 100 field site contractors working to support Dahlgren operations and also operate the nine remote field stations that make up the newly-named ‘‘Air Force Space Surveillance System (AFSSS).”

The nine AFSSS field stations, designed to track satellites and debris in orbit around the Earth, consist of a bi-static radar that points straight up into space and produces a ‘‘fence” of electromagnetic energy. The system can detect basketball-sized objects in orbit around the Earth out to an effective range of 15,000 nautical miles. More than five million satellite detections, or observations, are collected by the AFSSS each month. Data collected is transmitted to a computer center at Dahlgren, where it is used to constantly update a space object catalog of spacecraft and debris critical in maintaining space situational awareness.

The ASCC is responsible as a backup to the JSpOC-SSAOC. It is responsible for tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters orbiting the Earth. The unit maintains around-the-clock, 365-days-a-year support to constantly track these objects. They task the Space Surveillance Network, a worldwide network of 29 space surveillance sensors (radar and optical telescopes, both military and civilian) to observe the objects. Then the crews use computers at Dahlgren to match sensor observations to the more than 15,000 man-made orbiting objects and update the position of each one. These updates form the Space Catalog, a comprehensive listing of the numbers, types, and orbits of man-made objects in space.

Lt Col. Steven Krehbiel
Commander 20th Space Control Squadron, Detachment 1